


Inattentive

by AcidAngel21



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: (some), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, CC-3636 | Wolffe Has ADHD, Gen, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unreliable Narrator, technically canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:47:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29765373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AcidAngel21/pseuds/AcidAngel21
Summary: Some things just aren't visible from the outside.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & CC-3636 | Wolffe, Plo Koon & CC-3636 | Wolffe
Comments: 2
Kudos: 27





	Inattentive

**Author's Note:**

> So a few notes. I wrote this Wolffe as ADHD-Inattentive because technically, that could work as canon-compliant. That doesn’t mean he won’t have other symptoms (I have combined (inattentive and hyperactive) type, so this a little outside my experience, but not too far). Also, Wolffe and pretty much everyone else is an unreliable narrator when it comes to ADHD. 
> 
> There are some serious drawbacks, and some surprising advantages that people might not really realize. I don’t think canon!Wolffe is actually ADHD, but I do think that a lot of characters are written with some ADHD characteristics and it’s kind of fun to read/write them through that lens. 
> 
> I also imagine that this Wolffe masks a lot of it pretty much 24/7 unless he’s around brothers who already know about it. Not that that’ll do much around a Jedi, but it’s the principal of the thing for this Wolffe. Also it’s a literally life-saving habit and skill from Kamino.
> 
> All that said, I am very much not an expert and this is just for fun.
> 
> (This was also originally titled The ADHD-Wolffe AU That Nobody Including Me Asked For)

It wasn’t that Wolffe didn’t pay attention. Actually, he paid a lot of attention, just not always at the right time or to the right things. Even as a cadet, he’d notice things the others might not pay attention to, but he’d tune out as soon as something wasn’t interesting enough. The thing was that he was smart enough to cover for it. There weren’t any outward symptoms of his deficiency for the longnecks to do any real in depth genetic testing, and he kept it that way. If Cody sometimes had to repeat things, well that happened with everyone from time to time. Wolffe just needed a few reminders, that was all.

And if, say, Wolffe was more likely to bite their trainer or fight dirty, then that was just an advantage.

The thing was that Wolffe could and would zone out no matter how hard he tried. So he had a lot of ways to cover for that. He recorded every meeting with General Koon, no matter how short, and went over the recording until he could recite everything forwards and backwards before he erased it. He took stim-shots, and while they didn’t help him get rid of all the symptoms, what little they did do was worth the occasional mild heart palpitation. He also planned out every minute and stuck to the schedule religiously if they weren’t in an active war zone, lest he wanted to get behind on things that could save his men’s lives.

Wolffe did all his flimsiwork at night. For how hard it was to focus, sometimes he could sit and do that at night for hours before he’d look up and realize he had less than an hour to sleep before he had to actually be on duty that day. Tidal wasn’t a fan of that setup, but Tidal wasn’t the one with a desk that was constantly covered in datapads and flimsiwork, so Wolffe didn’t really give a fek. Getting to sleep meant at least an hour of tossing and turning and listening to his brain race, even before Abregado. After, it was just a different form of the same thing. That wasn’t something he was interested in dealing with until he had to.

What most people, even Cody (he did try; Wolffe knew that) didn’t realize was that Wolffe got bored in _seconds_. Hells, standing around at attention with nothing to do for five minutes was fekking torture, not that anyone could tell he felt that way. Even after Abregado, Wolffe still couldn’t stand anything being too quiet for long. Any time they had nothing to do and he’d caught up on all his work (which was already like pulling teeth sometimes) he’d surf the holonet, he’d eat something they weren’t supposed to have, he’d clean his armor (again), he’d clean his weapons (again), he’d read until his eyes were sore, he’d check and re-check things until his subordinates were all annoyed with him. Anything to stave off the mind numbing, soul sucking boredom that made him feel like his brain was rotting inside his skull.

Wolffe wasn’t kriffing laandur, okay? He could take an insult, a punch, any of that. Honestly, he couldn’t care less what the civilians of the Republic thought about him and his brothers. But no matter how deep down he buried it, there was a creeping, quiet dread that he’d be abandoned by everyone, including Boost, Sinker, and everyone else, if he ever fekked up even a little. Whether he liked it or not, most of his interactions with pretty much anyone he actually gave a kark about were laced with him trying to make sure he paid attention, didn't accidentally repeat himself, and/or forcefully keeping himself from interrupting them, and were then followed by him being deeply afraid that he hadn’t done a good enough job. He was very good at looking like he really didn’t care, but that didn’t mean that thing didn’t have power over him. More than he liked. And if he was secretly afraid that General Koon hated him after he accidentally interrupted him or anything like that, then that was between him and the Ka’ra.

The great secret of the 104th was that Wolffe lost things constantly. Bucket? Yeah, he put it down in the mess and forgot it was there. One of his spare pairs of socks? Somehow abandoned in a communal fresher that wasn’t even on the same deck as his quarters. His favorite canteen? Got left in General Koon’s office for four days before he finally managed to remember to ask the general about it. Don’t even get Sinker started about the number of times he’d found one of Wolffe’s datapads somewhere. It was an open secret, but a secret just the same. Because, look. Wolffe was a really good fekking CO, okay? So a little forgetfulness when it came to things that really were just things was okay by them. (And by General Koon too, if anybody were to have asked him.)

The open secret amongst Wolffe’s batchers was the sheer number of things he’d gotten obsessed with, then dropped within the span of a couple of months. Some obsessions were sustained (sometimes simultaneously with other ones). But most of them were short bursts where it seemed like that was all Wolffe could think, talk, or learn about. He’d pick up vast amounts of information that he’d absorb almost overnight seemingly for the rest of his (unnaturally short) life in spurts of research that spanned all the different ways they had to learn anything on Kamino. Sometimes he got lucky (and so did the rest of his batchers) and those obsessions would line up with whatever they were learning at the time. Most times they didn’t and Wolffe would have to painstakingly reteach himself what he was supposed to have gotten two kriffing weeks ago within the framework of whatever his obsession at the time was while also trying to stay on top of whatever they were learning that week too.

What wasn’t a secret was how impulsive Wolffe could be. Oh sure, Rex had that down to a science and Bly was as crazy as his own jetii and everyone knew it. But Wolffe was on another level. In no particular order: he’d insulted Ventress when she had a lightsaber right next to his face (lost an eye for that one), bitten Walon Vau hard enough to give the man a scar through his armorweave (got a very broken skull for that one), spread a rumor that Tarkin was into Gamoreans (nobody ever really figured that one out and Wolffe never could decide if he was happy about it or not), and gotten into very public verbal and physical fights with any number of Coruscanti natives (both of the Guard and Standard Asshole variety) over any number of personal things when he wasn’t in uniform. He had also outright taken over command from a nat-born CO without a single care as to the consequences after insulting them to their face, bad-mouthed and mocked both the chancellor and Mas Amedda without much of a thought when he was around only his closest brothers, and verbally poked and prodded those same vode, from Gree to Cody, to the point of (admittedly fond, though deeply profound) exasperation. Rex wasn’t as easy to get to that point (General Skywalker was on a different scale both for being intensely annoying and insanely impulsive), but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t point it out when he got annoyed enough.

Wolffe got _bored_. It wasn’t that he thought he was smarter or anything at all like that. It also wasn’t that he really wanted to make his brothers hate him. But he couldn’t _stand_ that silent sitting around and doing nothing without feeling like he was a nanometer from going completely insane.

Plo Koon, for his part, was aware of Wolffe’s near constant struggles with attention. He respected his commander far too much to embarrass him by asking about it. In any case, there were distinct advantages to having someone with that type of neurology as his second in command, even if Plo hadn’t already cared about Wolffe far too much to _replace_ him (as though that would’ve _ever_ been acceptable). Real medication might’ve been helpful. But Plo was also painfully cognizant of the fact that the Kaminoans would see that as a severe defect and he had no desire to expose Wolffe to that kind of danger. Besides, he seemed to cope well enough without it, so who was Plo to interfere?

As far as Wolffe was concerned, with brothers like Rex running around with an obvious full head of blond hair, he was just lucky his mutation was more invisible than most.

**Author's Note:**

> Mando’a Translations
> 
> Laandur-Weak, Pathetic  
> Ka’ra-Stars  
> Jetii-Jedi  
> Vode-Siblings/Brothers


End file.
